Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [61]
Let me clarify the stakes of my twofold claim that Lovelace's metarepresentational ability is selectively compromised and that the novel cultivates the scenes that make the reader uncertain of whether Lovelace is fully aware that his representations of other people's mental states are, at least on some level, his own self-serving inventions. As I have pointed out earlier, I am not interested in diagnosing Lovelace as slightly schizophrenic. Neither am I invested in figuring out exactly which version of reality Lovelace truly believes in. Lovelace does not exist. The reader does exist, however, and so does the novel as massive and focused experimentation with that reader's cognitive adaptations. Thus, from the perspective of cognitive theory, the ultimate reason that Lovelace goes through his elaborate and peculiarly flawed mind-games is that it allows the narrative to engage, train, tease, and titillate our metarepresentational ability. Our brain is the focus of the novel's attention, its playground, its raison d'etre, its meaning, whereas Lovelace, Clarissa, Dorcas, MacDonald, and all other characters are but the means for delivering this kind of wonderfully rich stimulation to the variety of cognitive adaptations making up our Theory of Mind.
Thus we may completely miss one level of Lovelace's manipulation of his reality or add another level, one that Richardson never intended. You may vehemently disagree with my interpretation of what Lovelace thinks, or of what he thinks that he thinks, or of what he wants Clarissa to believe, or of what Dorcas thinks MacDonald knows, and so on. We may profitably historicize Lovelace's mind processes, arguing, for example, that his lack of empathy with Clarissa and her middle-class kin is symptomatic of the general crisis of the aristocratic worldview during the Industrial Revolution, or that Richardson's particular interest in "sentiments" (i.e., feelings and their bodily and verbal expressions) was predicated upon certain developments in eighteenth-century natural philosophy. Every single one of our interpretations, honest mistakes, willful inventions, disagreements, and historical groundings will be imperceptibly but inescapably enmeshed with our ability to keep track of who in this novel thinks what and when. (If you doubt it, try making a single argument interpreting Clarissa within any framework of your choice without implicitly relying on such source-monitoring!) Because of its obsessive, unrelenting focus on people's representations of other people's mental states, Clarissa continues to structure our interpretations in this particular way (which is not to say that it renders them predictable—quite the opposite!).
By the same token, our ongoing arguments over historical, aesthetic, and personal meanings of Clarissa themselves expand the range of the novel's engagement with our metarepresentational ability. As we take in any given innovative reading of Richardson's magnum opus, it latches onto our individual metarepresentational ecology in a myriad of unpredictable ways. Clarissa thus reenters culture with every new interpretation because it is peculiarly geared to its exclusive environment: the responsive, dynamic, learning, and changing, but always metarepresenting, human mind.
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he writer who creates an unreliable narrator runs an exciting and ter
rible risk: his or her readers may wind up believing the narrator's version of events. That is what happened to the author of Clarissa when he depicted Lovelace as apparently